Goldberg to Ann Romney and New Media: So Not Sorry

After comparing Ann Romney to Hitler and Stalin for writing her Mother’s Day fluff piece on motherhood, professional feminist author Michelle Goldberg faced strong New Media blowback, and she’s miffed about it.

So miffed that she wrote an angry, rambling fauxpology on The Daily Beast, where she enjoys a platform as a senior writer. Goldberg attacked Ann Romney again as a “calculating political wife … who is now determined to play up the idea that’s she’s being victimized for being a stay-at-home mom….” 

Goldberg doesn’t just double down on her snarling attack, she exposes her larger theme that “bombastic odes to traditional maternity have a sinister ring, especially when they come from people who want to curtail women’s rights…”

Goldberg especially whines over the New Media reaction (see John Nolte’s timely piece on this important phenomenon) disassembling her ugly attack on conservative women:

So my apologies aren’t for Ann Romney, but for everyone else. I’m truly sorry to have given the right a pretext for another tedious spasm of feigned outrage. I’m sorry to have stirred one of the teapot tempests that now dominate the increasingly dispiriting world of political journalism. I’m especially sorry if I’ve done anything to strengthen the conservative myth that liberals disdain motherhood.

“Teapot tempests” and “increasingly dispiriting world of political journalism”? Yeah, blowback from the New Media is a mother, isn’t it, Goldberg?

How dispiriting indeed for a prestigious, award-winning author to find herself publicly humiliated by the New Media proletariat. But her antipathy toward conservatives and, in particular, Christians, runs even deeper. Goldberg’s world regards conservatives as men who “see women’s submission as key to their own identity.” But if conservatives seek women’s submission, how does Goldberg reconcile that 50 percent of conservatives are (gasp) women (like Ann Romney or Sarah Palin)? Vilify them. Marginalize them. Nazify them.

Correlated to this contempt for conservatives, Goldberg’s 2006 book “Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalists” fed raw meat to fretting left wing fringers seeing theocratic conspiracies under every rock during the Bush presidency. Goldberg recently doubled down on that hysteria by labeling this year’s Republican presidential candidates as “the most theocratic Republican field in history” and questioned it as a “Christian plot” whose subversive goal was to “rule the world,” concluding that “it turned out we [liberal tinfoil hatters] weren’t paranoid enough.”

Such paranoid visions of a vast Christian conspiracy plotting theocratic revolution and world domination needs little extrapolation to out Ann Romney as a Nazi because she writes a fluff piece on motherhood.

Goldberg’s paradigm of the clichéd East Coast, non-religious, upper-middle-class liberal urbanite feminist does not accommodate conservative women, particularly religious ones, and most particularly “radical” Christian ones. 

Goldberg’s poke-in-the-eye non-apology betrays fear. To Goldberg, is Ann Romney a heretic whose maternal example could spread apostasy and doubt among traditional feminist believers? After all, how is it possible that a smart, well educated, woman could be pro-life, choose to marry, have more than 2.1 children and stay at home to raise them, battle cancer and multiple sclerosis and, in the end, seem happy and cheerful and successful?

Ann Romney’s example of motherhood threatens the mythology that radical feminism has propagandized for decades – in Goldberg’s words, it is “sinister.”

Goldberg’s attack appears no less arbitrary or contemptuous than Hilary Rosen’s attack on Ann Romney her last month. Left wing feminists convey no desire to co-exist with the Ann Romneys of the world. Not only will they spit venom at her and those like her but, when push comes to apologize, they will only double down in their rage.